November 10, 2024 - The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. Thank you for coming together to be the church this morning. If ever there has been a Sunday morning when I wanted to ignore what was happening in the world around us and just sing some familiar songs, have communion, and then go to brunch, this would be that Sunday. For many of us here, though certainly not all of us (a fact I hope we can remember at brunch this morning)... for many of us, it has been a heavy and difficult week.
Some of you have probably heard the quote that Christians must “hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” and I usually like that idea, but for many of us, the newspaper this week held cause for alarm, for sadness, for confusion, for genuine fear of what the future may hold. The actual quote on which that newspaper axiom is based is by Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who actually said, to Time Magazine in 1966, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper and read both, but interpret newspapers from your Bible.” It’s not the other way around; they are not equal partners. I think for us this morning, drowning in election news as we may be, we could all use some foundational Bible to remind us of the good news of Jesus Christ that’s bigger and better than the news of the world.
That was my first thought at least, this week, as I woke up on Wednesday to news that former president Trump was re-elected to serve a second term beginning in January 2025. An hour or two after waking up, two dozen of us gathered here and started our Wednesday morning with a service of Morning Prayer and coffee in community. Later, ten of us held our usual Healing Service at noon, a conversation around the lectionary and our prayer requests for the week. By Thursday, I had listened to four different sermons from leaders around the Episcopal Church, all written after the election results. Each reiterated the points that we’ve been making here for months, that our hope is found in God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, in the body of Christ, and in the Kingdom of God we are working toward, looking toward, and hoping for here on earth. Our hope is not found in political parties or leaders or in one particular year’s election results. We know this.
And yet, as I heard words from my own sermons repeated back to me in the mouths of other preachers, it often just felt inadequate. “Yes, yes, internet preacher, that’s all well and good, but this is real life, save me your platitudes and your empty words.” I won’t say I was despairing this week, I do actually deeply believe all the things I’ve been preaching up here, and my hope really does lie elsewhere; one presidential election won’t change that. But when your heart is breaking for your LGBTQ friends, when you know that many of your black and brown brothers and sisters are hurting and afraid, when you wonder if women can ever be accepted as leaders in this nation, especially by fellow Christians, well, sometimes sermons don’t feel like enough, sometimes all of this that we’re doing here doesn’t feel like enough. Too much is broken; it’s just not enough. And I know if I was there this week, some of you are certainly still there this morning.
So, maybe we do need to turn to the text. Maybe some of us have been doing that for days now, maybe we need to keep doing it. The Episcopal Church is much like other churches throughout history who emphasized that "our praying shapes our believing," not the other way around. I’ve talked about this a bit before... Our actions, our rituals, our habits, they all actively form us. By saying words like the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed, by opening the lectionary texts on a daily or weekly basis, by coming to the table for the bread and the wine, those very actions shape us into being the Christians we hope to be. We work toward something we hope to be, first with our lives, not our thoughts, with our actions, not our beliefs. We do not come to the Bible or to church or even to God first when we feel like doing it, we come to the Bible and to church and to God even when we don’t feel like it so that we may feel like doing it more often. We build these forming habits by doing them. As Paulo Freire wrote, “we make the road by walking.”
So today, we come to the Bible, to our lectionary text, hoping that it can ground us in something different than despair, fear, or frustration. Our gospel text for this morning comes from the Gospel according to Mark, and after All Saints Day, we rejoin his story in the 12th chapter. Jesus and his disciples have made their way to Jerusalem at this point, he arrived in chapter 11 after cursing a fig tree (which is a fun little story, side note), but we skip over those stories in October and November’s readings so we can save them for Palm Sunday. Now, Jesus is sitting in the temple, answering questions, telling parables, trying to avoid the traps that the Pharisees, Sadducees, chief priests, and elders are all trying to set for him. The regular people were all gathering around to listen, and the verse right before our lectionary selection this week says, “the large crowd was listening to him with delight.” I love that image: common people, gathered around, excited to hear this man avoid the verbal and religious traps of their leaders. I imagine a lot of laughter.
See, this was a big deal: Jesus, the prophet who was performing miracles and teaching all over Galilee and Judea, who was multiplying fish and bread and healing the sick and the blind and the broken, who was driving out demons and even raising his friend Lazarus from the dead, Jesus is sitting in the temple for all to hear. This could be where Jesus lays out his campaign platform, or where he decides who to endorse, or where he delivers his own scathing critique of the Roman Empire, rallying the Jews to revolution. Instead, of course, he tells stories, he confounds their long-held and long-taught wisdom. Jesus is not going to be another ruler, or praise those who are ruling, he is going to change things up.
In verses 38-44, Jesus does two key things. First, he warns the people gathered there to beware of those who like attention, who appear to be devout but instead are focused on their own positions of power, no matter the cost. “They devour widows’ houses” is such a good line, but it’s damning; these are people who step on others, especially those in need, to achieve their own selfish gain and fame and applause. We applaud these sort of people still today. Jesus says they will receive the greater condemnation... In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says these people have “received their reward in full.” Let them have it.
Immediately after that, Jesus lifts up the poor again, raising up the widow who gave all she had to live on, to the temple treasury. (If ever there was a text built for a sermon during a stewardship campaign, this is it! If only there hadn’t been a few other things going on in the world this week.) After decrying those who love attention, Jesus calls out the rich who give only out of their abundance, giving only when they have extra after first spending on themselves... and then he lifts up the widow who trusts in God with all that she has, who gives both of her coins and then has nothing left to live on. “How irresponsible of her,” we might think. But this, Jesus tells us, is the greater offering.
These stories come in the context of teaching in the temple, as I’ve said, but they also come just ten verses after my favorite verses in the entire Bible, verses I’ve mentioned in sermons already and will continue to mention, verses I need to hear so often that I have them tattooed on my wrist. We have verses 38-44 today; but in verses 28-34, Jesus tells the assembly gathered at the temple that the greatest commandments in all of their holy, beloved scripture are: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Ten verses after saying these two commandments are the very foundation of real faith, Jesus gives us two examples to prove his point: Those who love attention, who crave places of honor, they fail to love their neighbor and love to love themselves... and, those who give only out of their abundance fail to love God with their heart, soul, mind, and strength, with everything, like the widow does. The lowly widow, in this text, confounds us, she frustrates us; how irresponsible! If she did that today, the church would have to feed her! Especially for us in American/Western society who so value independence and self-sufficiency, the widow’s offering doesn’t make logical sense. Surely not, Jesus.
But in some ways, that’s the entire point. That’s the lesson we have today, that the way of Jesus confounds our common sense. It is counter to the way we assume we have to live in the world, where we have to hoard our own resources to make sure we can always be self-sufficient, where we should pursue those places of honor at banquets, where we deserve to be greeted with respect in the streets and marketplaces thanks to all the good that we have done. Jesus says repeatedly throughout scripture – but especially to us here in the gospel today – to love God and neighbor so completely, with all that we have, that people will have to ask us why we’re being so strange, why we don’t fall in line with or act like everyone else. As it says in 1 Peter, “We are a peculiar people, having been called out from darkness and into God’s marvelous light.” Do people think of us as peculiar?
Friends, this is the message for us this morning, the message we need to keep coming back to, even when the world seems to be fully worthy of our frustration and our despair, coming back to it in hopes that this message will shape all of us through our continual return to it. The message is this: Jesus came to turn everything upside-down, including our common sense. Jesus came to teach us to love God and love neighbor beyond any reasonable metric or expectation, with everything that we have and with everything that we are. And that, that love lived out, is what truly changes the world: not political power, but love.
My hope for us at the Church of the Epiphany this week is that we will continue to be wholly devoted to God and to our neighbor, that we will give of ourselves more like the widow than like the rich, that we will beware of those who oppress or neglect the poor while seeking their own selfish gain, and then that we will commit to becoming more like Christ together, in community, in relationship, and in our daily lives.
Even in the toughest of times, that will be more than enough. Amen.
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